Emma Armstrong of FCB
What are you responsible for?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 224: Emma Armstrong
Here’s a question. What are you responsible for?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I’m asked to coach their leaders and their leadership teams. To help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Emma Armstrong. She is the CEO of FCB New York. Most recently, the office was named Agency of the Year at the Clio Awards. Both as an office and as a company, the last few years have been stellar by anyone’s standards.
There are always many reasons for a company’s success, particularly when that success is sustained - the hardest kind to achieve. In my conversation with Emma, she described client relationships in a way that stayed with me long after we had said goodbye.
“We truly care about their business and we're curious about it and we're curious about them. We're very, very, very aware. I am very aware of the fact that choosing to work with us is a choice that can massively affect their career. And that has to be, there has to be a value add that you have to take that responsibility seriously.”
Unlocking creative thinking and innovation is hard to do when you are in a vendor-supplier relationship. Because, while creativity is the most powerful business problem solver we have, it requires conditions and an environment not always present when one side is telling the other what to do.
Creativity and innovation are fueled by trust. And trust happens when you believe that the person on the other side of the table, or the screen, cares - genuinely cares - about your well-being.
The creative industries have many people who do not engender trust. They demand more for less - more output for less money. More commitment for less respect.
But the true and full power of creativity is unleashed when all parties take seriously the responsibility that each of us has to the person across the table.
Brand, agency, employer, employee. Parent, child, friend. When both of us can put the other person’s interests first, well, that’s when the world is changed.
Here’s Emma Armstrong.
Charles (02:34):
Emma, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Emma Armstrong (02:38):
Thanks so much, Charles. I'm super excited to be here.
Charles (02:41):
I know we talked a little bit about this the last time you were on with the leadership team, but I'm going to ask you the question again and just out of curiosity to see whether, A, your thinking has evolved, or B, whether you actually come up with a different answer. When did creativity first show up in your life? When are you first conscious of creativity being a thing in your life?
Emma Armstrong (02:56):
So, creativity, the two moments, that did two very different things, both strangely associated with Salvador Dali. So when I was at school, I went to a debate talk and someone came in and talked about Salvador Dali and symbolism in his work, and it was the first time someone had.... I'd been to, you know, galleries and theaters, but it was the first time someone had truly deconstructed the creative process and the elements of creativity that were very insightful and also personal to one artist, and explains to where they came from, and showed the evolution through his work, which was incredibly mind opening and inspiring for me, thinking through the logical process of creativity which I loved.
And then a few years later, I was living in London and I went to this Salvador Dali Museum, on the banks of the Thames, and not only did they have the exhibition there, but they also had a ton of his sketches. And I don't think I had fully processed the craftsmanship that went in to these paintings, or any of the paintings. And he, like a lot of very famous artists, was just a constant sketcher and there were hundreds and hundreds of them spread out across multiple rooms. And just the fact that you could work for years on that craft to make one painting was an incredibly powerful lesson in sort of persistence and always learning.
Charles (04:25):
I'm always struck, or often struck, I should say, by how prolific great talent, great artists often are, aren't they? I mean, just the volume of work they produce over a lifetime is pretty extraordinary. And a lesson to those of us who keep thinking we should create stuff but never quite seem to manage to make the time. They inevitably did. How did you express yourself as a child?
Emma Armstrong (04:46):
So I… obviously, there was no internet or phones. so I read a lot. I didn't write as much, I read a lot. But we were always surrounded by, I have three younger sisters, and a, you know, very busy but very craft orientated mom, so I learned to… and grandmother, so I learned to sew, and to needlepoint, and to knit, and crochet, and paint and draw and do all those things. So, if I didn't have my nose in a book, then I probably had… I was probably making something at varying standards of quality. But always fun. It was always fun.
Charles (05:26):
Were you a risk taker as a child? Were you the one out in front?
Emma Armstrong (05:31):
No. Definitely not. That… I think that that role is reserved for younger siblings. I'm the classic, A-Type, highly responsible, highly anxious eldest child. Very worried about safety and security for everybody in my entire vicinity.
Charles (05:47):
So, as a counterpoint to that, I read somewhere in an interview that you gave, that in your, I think it was your late 20s, you upped and quit your job one day and bought a plane ticket and flew off to Australia and New Zealand and spent a year and a half traveling around, and spent a year living in New Zealand. What prompted that?
Emma Armstrong (06:09):
Are you trying to prove that I'm a risk taker, Charles (laughs)?
Charles (06:12):
(laughs).
Emma Armstrong (06:13):
Calculated risk taker. So I was living in London. I was single at the time. And I had lived through the internet kind of dot com bubble and burst. We'd gone from a company of, I don't know, 500 people down to about 150 people over two rounds of layoffs. And at the time, I was so excited to keep my job because I was the A-Type, achieving, kind of non-risk taker. And then I realized a few months in that all my clients were scared, no one had any budget to do any good work. I was doing everybody else's job who had already left. And it just, there was this moment where it didn't look like the world was going change from an economy and from a job opportunity point-of-view any time soon.
So I went and bought a round-the-world plane ticket, that I had been planning for a while. I'd sort of been sitting there with a map and figuring out, you know, which of my eight stops I was going to make in which order, because you have to keep, once you start, you have to keep going around the world. You can't go back on yourself.
And then when I got to New Zealand, I had a work visa just in case I needed to earn some money. And I happened to get a job as a horse track guide. Which I think made me a great… made me a much better account person because I had to talk to all these people from around the world, young and old, some of them had been on horses before, some of them never had. And I had to keep them calm and entertained for three hours. So, it was an incredible experience. It was an incredible experience going off by myself and building kind of a life by myself, but it was an amazing opportunity to learn to find interest in any human, really.
Charles (08:03):
As you look back on your embarkation on that trip, what are you conscious of in terms of the emotions that were going through you?
Emma Armstrong (08:11):
Well, interestingly, I was very excited to go. I ended up leaving, I bought the ticket for sort of two months hence, and I ended up leaving a few weeks after 9/11. So, I remember being excited to go. I remember my parents being very scared, because if you think back to that, it's harder to access those feelings now and how the world felt then, but no one really knew what was going to happen next. It was a very destabilizing and globally anxiety inducing time, which sounds a bit crazy after three years of pandemic to say that, but, it really felt, everything felt very unstable and I think they were very worried about me skipping off around the world with no job.
Charles (09:00):
Yeah, I mean, it was a time of enormous unpredictability and we didn't know what was coming next and we weren't completely convinced we knew where it had come from, so the notion of getting on a plane and… I love the idea that you had to plan the trip because you couldn't go backwards, you had to keep going. It's a bit like Phileas Fogg isn't, and, you know, once you've started (laughs) the journey, you're off to the races literally and figuratively.
What did you learn about yourself over the course of that entire experience?
Emma Armstrong (09:28):
I think resilience. Resilience and also just the ability that.… It's an amazing opportunity and I say that with hindsight. It wasn't something I'd planned out. But it's an amazing opportunity to go to a place fully by yourself and then, and build a life, and build… you know, by the time I left, I had friends, I had a job, I had somewhere to live, I had a paycheck, I had a bank account and sort of the trappings of a life. And that teaches you incredible resilience, I think.
Charles (10:03):
What's your relationship with fear in general as you look, as you look at your life, you look at yourself today? How do you feel about fear?
Emma Armstrong (10:12):
That's a good question. I don't spend much time thinking about fear. I mean, there's sort of… I guess there are two pieces to it. One is, I think I'm propelled by a fear of letting others down. Whether it be friends, family, work colleagues, the company overall. I'm very aware of the responsibility that my job entails, or that, you know, my role as a mom to two kids entails. But it's not a… I don't feel fearful. I think it's just a, it's a propellant, and it's something that's there. And then I guess on the other side, I often describe my job as stopping people from messing up, but if seeing risks before they occur and trying to mitigate for them, plan so that they don't happen. So I guess that's probably a piece of fear as well, or is driven by fear as well, of sort of fear of things that could be prevented going wrong.
Charles (11:17):
And when you're leading a business that, as in your case, is dependent entirely on creativity and creative thinking for its success, how do you find the right balance between ameliorating risk, as you just talked about, and giving people room to actually explore, make mistakes, all of those things that we know are endemic to great creative thinking, great creative output? What's the balance for you?
Emma Armstrong (11:42):
You know, we all live in a world where mistakes are… it feels like we live in a world where mistakes are less and less tolerated. Things are too easy to screen capture and send around the world in a hot second. I think running, running an agency, there are sort of two pieces to it. I think I have a relatively low tolerance for mistakes that could be easily stopped from happening, particularly from an account management standpoint. So just pick up a phone, have a conversation, that type of thing. So there are those mistakes.
But then from a creative standpoint, I mean, you know, you're always trying to do things that have never been done before. You're bringing together two different things, combining them to solve a problem. So, we talk a lot about, and I'm stealing this from my wonderful colleagues, ideas are either on strategy or off strategy. So, it's less about mistakes in the creativity, it's more about the bravery of pushing as far as you can to solve the problem. Which I think is the positive side of mistakes.
Charles (12:52):
Yeah. I think that's true.
I think, too, the point about challenging the question becomes a really important part of the process as well, doesn't it? I mean, you have to make sure that, to use the vernacular, the brief is right, but to me, the issue has always been, are you asking the right question to start with? Because if you aren't, that's when the whole thing becomes, I think, very risky, and if you are asking the right question then suddenly you've got a whole bunch of energy being focused on areas that potentially are really valuable.
Emma Armstrong (13:21):
Yeah. For sure. And we've spent a lot of time focusing over the last couple of years on making sure, to your point, we're truly solving the right problem. Because a lot of companies still aren't fully set up to either identify or empower the teams that technically are in charge of marketing, to solve that business problem. There's often a disconnect between those two things. So, for us, it's really important that we're solving the right business problem. For the clients, it's really important that we're solving the right business problem. And that might not be something that they have full control over either.
So, but you're right. That's definitely where the risk comes in because, we've all seen the work that goes out into the world that is disconnected from the real problem that needs to be solved.
Charles (14:12):
One of the traits that I've always thought was consistent among the most creatively successful agencies, and clearly, you guys are as good at that as anybody is in the industry that's been over the last two or three years. But one of the traits I've always seen is the ability to develop really, really powerful, meaningful, very human partnerships with your clients. That there is a real sense of, or ability to get in and really understand, what is the problem? What are the clients' real needs? How do we make sure that we are really focused on the right area?
How do you go about building the kind of relationships that that requires with your clients? How do you create more of a partnership than a supplier-buyer dynamic that typically exists in a lot of companies?
Emma Armstrong (14:58):
It's a little bit like matchmaking and dating. The right clients find the right agency partners and vise versa. We have been incredibly fortunate over the last few years to find some amazing, amazing people that have a fundamental shared belief in what we do, in creativity as an economic multiplier, in the power of relationships, bringing together people and creating truly one team who take full responsibility together for identifying the problem, figuring out the strategy, getting to the work that then moves the needle on business. So I think, when you have that shared belief, it's intrinsically easier to build that relationship.
But we truly care about their business and we're curious about it and we're curious about them. We're very, very, very aware. I am very aware of the fact that choosing to work with us is a choice that can massively affect their career. And that has to be, there has to be a value add that you have to take that responsibility seriously.
So, being on the same side, not just from the task at hand or solving the business problem, but taking care of everybody as human beings, you have careers that they have to attend to and things that they want to achieve in their lives, that we can do together and we all play a part in. So I think having those conversations right off the bat and then consistently being curious and making sure that we're treating their business and their lives and careers as if they're our own, just sets a really good foundation of trust and transparency.
Charles (16:36):
That was one of those moments that happens on this podcast that I'm struck by, both in the moment and on reflection, which is, I've never heard anybody talk about taking, being caring for the career of a client. And it's such an obvious reference point. And it's, I think, it's very powerful, both on a, certainly on a human level, on every level, but certainly on a human level. I find that to be a rare expression and a very powerful one of part of what I think makes you guys very successful and what makes you successful. I'd never heard anybody say that before out loud.
COVID obviously changed a lot for everybody. How did COVID change your leadership? What did you evolve and adapt as a result of COVID?
Emma Armstrong (17:23):
I don't know if it changed anything specifically, or almost sort of like the dials on a soundboard. Some things go more important, and I think I became more overtly aware of some things. Maybe those two things are the same. So, the need for empathy and to truly think through what other people are going through when you're interacting with them, obviously had never been stronger, and became more of an intentional practice when I was talking to people. It has to be there in the creative industry anyway. But I think we all sort of probably dialed it up a lot more.
And it really reinforced my fundamental belief that you have to be together certain periods of time in a working week to create a culture where people feel safe and secure and can be their most creative selves. And I say that in the broadest sense. I mean, every single person at the agency from, you know, Rich, our office manager, through to the ECDs and beyond, are all creative. But, you know, we were highly unusual in that we came back. The management team came back two years ago, as soon as everyone was vaccinated. We had the agency come back in part, well over a year and a half ago. And we've been doing a structured hybrid for almost that entire time. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the office, Monday, Friday discretionary.
And I think, I look around over the last six months, particularly, there have been key moments where I've watched people interact at the agency, and it feels like one cohesive unit, where whether we've either had outside speakers come in and talk about DEI, for example, and they've come, we've talked afterwards, and they've remarked at how connected the people felt and able to speak, to talk about whatever they wanted to, all the way through to our holiday party, where I looked around and I'm like, oh, everybody actually knows each other. It's not siloed. It's not in teams. And I think it's something I've always believed about creativity, but COVID truly made us reassess it and formalize that belief. And I think it's been significant in the quality of work that we've managed to create for our clients over the last couple of years.
Charles (19:46):
And I'm curious about your view of the flip side of that coin, because as you just identified, you guys were very early to come back into the office. You've clearly seen the benefit of bringing people together. There are a number of companies in the industry who I think have become more and more outspoken about the importance of spending the majority of the week together. But have you also seen a benefit to people spending the rest of the time not in the office? Have you felt that has shifted for some people in terms of their ability to show up or contribute or think differently? What's the upside of Mondays and Fridays being discretionary or not in the office?
Emma Armstrong (20:22):
I think, that's a very good question. And I think it becomes a very individual answer because it's hard to measure the impact of individual kind of creativity, or creative thought, you know, in those moments. I hope everyone feels a little more autonomy over their lives, because it's not just…. It was almost as if we had to remind everybody that we worked in a relatively flexible industry anyway. And perhaps that flexibility was not equitable, which, I think if you were more junior, you didn't feel that it was as flexible. Which is understandable. I think that, I hope that there's a slightly more egalitarian feeling about that flexibility because, yes, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we're in the office, but you know what? If you have a fridge being delivered in your Brooklyn apartment, you can still work from home Wednesday to make sure that fridge gets delivered.
And it's even easier because we're now structured in a way where the world is kind of structured more for some sort of integrated virtual and in-person communication the entire time.
Charles (21:24):
You're the CEO of one of the most successful offices of one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world. Most of us will never have a job like that. What's this job really like?
Emma Armstrong (21:37):
I think the first thing is, mentally I said, right now (laughs) in my head when you said that. And, you know, earlier you talked about fear. I think this industry is so… the industry can be very fickle and can be very changeable. And we all see the stars that shine bright and then fall, and stars that shine bright and then fall. I think it's sort of tying a few different of your questions together. You asked about how COVID changed us and maybe it's just the awesome management team that we have and sort of our evolution as running the agency together.
But pretty early on we evolved from… as we started to scale, and win more business, we realized very quickly that there's only so much one person can do. And so we've got to focus on building a culture that is persistent and doesn't rely on individual. Individuals have a role in pushing it forward and maintaining it and evolving it, but it shouldn't be just reliant on a couple of different personalities. And our industry has traditionally been quite personality driven.
There are, when you think about it, very few brands that truly have persisted for long periods of time, in terms of being successful. So, I'm sure that's driven by fear (laughs). But also responsibility, again. Back to my responsibility as CEO is to make sure that the entity of FCB New York persists and is successful, so that the people who sail in the ship of FCB New York, you know, it's beneficial to them and they still have jobs and they have careers and they hopefully come to work most days, and have a great experience making things that they're very, very proud of and working with people they like, who challenge them, and make their days a bit better. So I don't know if that answers your question. Maybe that just answers my fear when you asked the question.
Charles (23:40):
Can you look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I've done this well’?
Emma Armstrong (23:44):
Nah. There's always a ton of things that you would… that should've been better. That's how… isn't that how we become who we become and how we make good places?
Charles (23:52):
But do you see the contribution you've been able to make to the success the company's had? Are you able to acknowledge that to yourself?
Emma Armstrong (24:01):
I think the biggest contribution, I hope the biggest contribution is bringing together the people, playing a part in leading and creating an environment that houses them, and make them feel that there aren't other better places to be right now. So, yes. I think I… I always tell them, like, “I'll stand in front of you if you need me to stand in front of you. I'll stand behind you and push you forward if you need me to.” I think that that is probably the biggest thing because, you know, I'm only one person. if they didn't turn up to work tomorrow, then that would be a big problem. If I didn't turn up to work tomorrow then the agency would move on (laughs) and it would be okay. So, yes, I think pulling together the people is probably the thing that I would say to myself in the mirror that I did the best.
Charles (24:55):
I know you're a long, long way from being finished with your career, but as you look back at it so far, do you have any regrets?
Emma Armstrong (25:01):
I regret not asking for more help when I was younger. I think, I hope, I've got a little better at asking for help. And I think this industry is traditionally very sink or swim. We don't take very good care of our people. We don't train them. And I'm very, very bullish about agencies. I really fundamentally believe in the importance of agencies. I think they have an incredible role to play as a translator of the world into brands and companies. And then of bringing brands and companies and products and thoughts out back into the world. And no matter how good you are as a company at trying to stay connected into the world, there's still just a gravitational pull into the center of the company to focus in rather than out.
So I really, really believe that that translation role. And also that fostering kind of a true culture of creativity and keeping that safe is… it's very, it's very important. And I think agencies have a very important role to play. But we've got to be really good business partners. So, and to do that you've got to train people. So, I think I sort of got by with… by figuring stuff out. I don't really want people to get by at, certainly at FCB New York or FCB in general, by just figuring stuff out. I want them to have common sense and to figure things out when they need to, but hopefully we're giving them training and support, and an environment where they can ask any questions and get any help that they need to succeed.
Charles (26:39):
And last two questions for you. How do you lead?
Emma Armstrong (26:46):
I think… I try and think, what would I want? What environment would I want to be in, or do I want to be in? What would I like to have available to me? Maybe that's why I'm so bullish on training and solving business problems. What do I wish I’d had 15, 20 years ago, from a leader of a business? Transparency, we talk a lot about transparency. We try and contextualize any decisions we're making. We try and explain why we take a pitch, why we don't take a pitch, why we have to pitch in the first place, puts a lot of strain sometimes on the organization, for example. And I kind of look back, I guess, and think through the places that I've been. The good, the bad, what I learned on both, because you learn always from both, and try and figure out what I would've preferred to have happened or the culture that I would've preferred to work in.
Charles (27:45):
And last question for you. What are you afraid of?
Emma Armstrong (27:49):
I don't know. I've been reading a lot about AI and the end of the world. So maybe on a more existential level, I'm a little bit afraid of that, but that feels like something I really can't control, so the retiring thing and what my children do for their jobs feels more, more accessible, immediately.
Charles (28:10):
I want to thank you for coming on the show. I think your warmth and your kindness and your determination and your intelligence speak volumes for who you are, and I think are obviously huge contributors to the success you've had and will go on having in the future. So thank you very much for joining with me today.
Emma Armstrong (29:28):
Aw, thanks, Charles. Always nice to hear nice things said about you. I appreciate that. Thank you very much for very good and insightful questions. You always make me think more about things that I probably should think more about in general.
Charles (28:42)
It’s my pleasure.
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